WIL MURRAY – ENEMIES OF THE NOVEL – Opens at BGP

Wil Murray is still haunted by author John Hawkes’ quote: “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.” Applying a similar ethos to painting, Murray’s practice centres around the production of materials and paint strokes used in his large-scale three-dimensional planar paintings, multiple exposure collages and more recent hand coloured photographic works; all an exploration of painting’s ragged edges overlapping collage, sculpture, performance and photography are united for his first solo exhibition in Vancouver since 2009.Wil Murray was born in Calgary, Canada in 1978.  He studied painting at the Alberta College of Art and Design. His work has  been exhibited internationally, including The National Gallery of Canada, East and Peggy Phelps Galleries (Claremont, US) and Staatsgalerie Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin). Solo exhibitions include; ‘Please Boss Remember Me’, VITRINE Bermondsey Street, London (2014); ‘Die Welt in Farben’, P|M Gallery, Toronto (2014); Carte Blanche 2, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2012);  and ‘Last Summer I Build A 1:8 Scale Model of Your Vagina’, Staatsgalerie Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. His work has also been chosen for presentation in Future Station: The Alberta Biennial 2015 at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Canada.He received an honourable mention in the prestigious RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2008 and his work was recently featured in ‘The Painting Project” Galerie UQAM’s award-winning survey of painting in Canada. Murray also played in several notoriously loud and short-spoken experimental bands. He currently works between Canada and Berlin.